What the dead know

Sanctuario de Chimayo       Kalus Priebe

among other things:      an excerpt from a meditation by Perdita Finn on The Way of the Rose:

 

… The darkness is the infinite dead whose lives have led to ours—the vanished stars, the old trees, the forgotten friends. In the darkness are nothing but mothers and lovers waiting to take us by the hand and guide us to the unimaginable and the impossible.
The dead have seen it all. They have seen civilizations rise and fall. They remember plagues and genocides, collapses and extinctions. They remember, too, ways of being that we have forgotten, secrets we need going forward, and what it means to see beyond the limits of a single human life. But like Inanna and Odysseus and the great heroes of myth and legend, we must journey to the underworld to receive the gifts of the dead before we can become who we really are.

Christmas in Madison Square              Paul Cornoyer